headless UPnP media renderer

 a general MediaServer. Fork of GMediaRenderer to add some features to make it usable.

I needed a small headless UPnP media renderer for Linux (for small footprint-use in a Raspberry Pi or CuBox), but there was not much available.

Found this old project GMediaRender - but it was incomplete, several basic features missing and the project has been abandoned several years ago.

So this is a fork of those sources to resurrect this renderer and add the missing features to be useful (Original sources in savannah cvs). To distinguish this project from the original one, this is called gmrender-resurrect.

After many features added, this is now a very usable, headless UPnP renderer that I would consider stable. You don't see many changes in this git - don't worry, this project is not abandoned, but it just works as intended (I use it every day). If you run into problems, please file bugs, write me directly or send a pull request; I am busy but will try to respond.

If you have tested gmrender resurrect with your control point, please add it to the Compatibility Wiki page (even if there is a problem). At this point, it should work with all media controllers, if not, please file a bug so that we can figure out the issue and I can make it work for you. See INSTALL.md how to create a logfile that helps to narrow down things.

If you're running this on a Raspberry Pi, you might be interested to connect a little LCD display. Check out the upnp-display github project.

Installation

For installation instructions, see INSTALL.md

from https://github.com/hzeller/gmrender-resurrect

------------------------

Installing

On a typical Ubuntu or Debian system, you need tools to be able to bootstrap the compilation configuration:

sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake libtool pkg-config

.. and the libraries needed for gmrender, most notably gstreamer.

sudo apt-get update
sudo aptitude install libupnp-dev libgstreamer1.0-dev \
             gstreamer1.0-plugins-base gstreamer1.0-plugins-good \
             gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly \
             gstreamer1.0-libav

(The code will also compile with the older 0.10 of gstreamer)

Then pulseaudio or alsa depending on what output you prefer (personally, I use alsa)

sudo aptitude install gstreamer1.0-alsa
sudo aptitude install gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio

Get the source. If this is your first time using git, you first need to install it:

sudo apt-get install git

.. Then check out the source:

git clone https://github.com/hzeller/gmrender-resurrect

Then configure and build:

cd gmrender-resurrect
./autogen.sh
./configure
make

You then can run gmrender directly from here if you want. The -f option provides the name under which the UPnP renderer advertises:

./src/gmediarender -f "My Renderer"

.. to install, run

sudo make install

The final binary is in /usr/local/bin/gmediarender (unless you changed the PREFIX in the configure step).

Running

Init Script

There is a sample init script in scripts/init.d/gmediarenderer that could be a good start if you install things on your system.

A systemd unit file can be found in dist-scripts/debian/gmrender-resurrect.service.

(To Linux distribution packagers: please let me know if you have some common changes that might be useful to have in upstream; other than that, just do what makes most sense in your distribution)

Commandline Options

If you write your own init script for your gmediarender, then the following options are particularly useful.

-f, --friendly-name

Friendly name to advertise. Usually, you want your renderer show up in your controller under a nice name. This is the option to set that name.

-u, --uuid

UUID to advertise. Usually, gmediarender comes with a built-in static id, that is advertised and used by controllers to distinguish different renderers. If you have multiple renderers running in your network, they will all share the same static ID. With this option, you can give each renderer its own id. Best way is to create a UUID once by running the uuidgen tool:

$ sudo apt-get install uuid-runtime
$ uuidgen
a07e8dfe-26a4-11e2-9dd1-5404a632c90e

You take different generated numbers and hard-code it in each script starting an instance of gmediarender (In my init script, I just generate some stable value based on the ethernet MAC address; see "Init Script" below).

Also, you can do this already at compile time, when running configure

./configure CPPFLAGS="-DGMRENDER_UUID='\"`uuidgen`\"'"

--gstout-audiosink and --gstout-audiodevice

You can set the audio sink and audio device with these commandline options. Say, you want to use an ALSA device. You can see the available devices with aplay -L. The main ALSA device is typically called sysdefault, so this is how you select it on the command line:

gmediarender --gstout-audiosink=alsasink --gstout-audiodevice=sysdefault

The options are described with

gmediarender --help-gstout

There are other ways to configure the default gstreamer output devices via some global system settings, but in particular if you are on some embedded device, setting these directly via a commandline option is the very best.

--gstout-initial-volume-db

This sets the initial volume on startup in decibel. The level 0.0 decibel is 'full volume', -20db would show on the UPnP controller as '50%'. In the following table you see the non-linear relationship:

 [decibel]  [level shown in player]
       0db    100     # this is the default if option not set
      -6db    85
     -10db    75
     -20db    50
     -40db    25
     -60db    0

So with --gstout-initial-volume-db=-10 the player would show up as being set to #75.

Note, as always with the volume level in this renderer, this does not influence the hardware level (e.g. Alsa), but only the internal attenuation. So it is advised to always set the hardware output to 100% by system means.

Running as daemon

If you want to run gmediarender as daemon, the follwing two options are for you:

-d, --daemon                      Run as daemon.
-P, --pid-file                    File the process ID should be written to.

Misc options

--logfile <logfile>               Write a logfile.
    If you want this on the terminal use --logfile /dev/stdout
    This can be big over time, so only do it for debugging.

In particular when you file a bug, please always attach the output of such a logfile; start gmrender-resurrect in foreground mode (without -d) on the commandline and give it a file to log into. Attach that to your bug-report.

The following command makes sure to capture all logs from gmediarender and other log entries that might come from gstreamer plugins not using the gmediarender logging, all in one file:

src/gmediarender -f "MyRender" --logfile=/tmp/gmrender.log >> /tmp/gmrender.log 2>&1

Other installation resources

Raspberry Pi

If you're installing gmrender-resurrect on the Raspberry Pi, there have been reports of bad sound quality. For one, the 3.5mm output is very low quality, so don't expect wonders (though it seems that driver changes improved this quality a lot).

You can use gmrender-resurrect with Pulseaudio or ALSA (or whatever other output ways gstreamer supports). Personally, I use ALSA as it is the most simple and robust way (Pulseaudio would be a layer on top of ALSA anyway). See flag --gstout-audiosink above how to tell gmediarender to use alsasink.

By default, ALSA seems to attempt some re-sampling apparently; A user pointed out that this can be fixed by putting this in your /etc/asound.conf

ctl.!default {
  type hw
  card 0
}

Stephen Phillips wrote a comprehensive blog-post about installing gmrender-resurrect on the Raspberry Pi (July 2013):

http://blog.scphillips.com/2013/07/playing-music-on-a-raspberry-pi-using-upnp-and-dlna-revisited/

Arch Linux

There is an Arch package available here https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gmrender-resurrect-git/

Debian

Since Debian 8, the official gmediarender package uses the gmrender-resurrect code: https://packages.debian.org/stretch/gmediarender

from https://github.com/hzeller/gmrender-resurrect/blob/master/INSTALL.md